The indefinite article in other languages

[WashAsDelicates]

All the non-English languages I have any knowledge of either have no indefinite article or use 'one' as both number and indefinite article.

Are there other languages that have a completely separate indefinite article like English does?

That's a really interesting question. The languages I know/can speak a bit of all use "one".

There are no articles in Finnish - that's one of the languages used where I work.

I think I should have said

All the non-English languages I have any knowledge of have no indefinite article and use 'one' as both number and indefinite article.

Are the indefinite article and definite article necessary at all? Is it like grammatical gender and noun inflections - some languages retained them and some shed them.

The indefinite article in English also comes from one (it was originally "an" but lost the n before consonants).

As they're not used in some languages they're clearly not necessary. The same can be said of a lot of grammar. Such as tenses.

Yes, Irish has no indefinite article. It is also a verb-subject-object language, and doesn’t have words for yes and no.